Autonomy over task is one of the essential aspects of the Motivation 3.0 approach to work. And it isn’t reserved only for technology companies. At Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., for instance, many nurses have the freedom to conduct their own research projects, which in turn have changed a number of the hospital’s programs and policies.10 Autonomy measures can work in a range of fields—and offer a promising source for innovations and even institutional reforms.
Initiatives like FedEx Days and sanctioned side projects aren’t always easy to execute in the day-to-day maw of serving customers, shipping products, and solving problems. But they’re becoming urgent in an economy that demands nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities—as any artist or designer would agree. Autonomy over task has long been critical to their ability to create. And good leaders (as opposed to competent “managers”) understand this in their bones.
Case in point: George Nelson, who was the design director at Her-man Miller, the iconic American furniture maker, for a few decades. He once laid down five simple tenets that he believed led to great design. One of these principles could serve as a rallying cry for Type I’s ethic of autonomy over task: “You decide what you will make.”
Time
Ever wonder why lawyers, as a group, are so miserable? Some social scientists have—and they’ve offered three explanations. One involves pessimism. Being pessimistic is almost always a recipe for low levels of what psychologists call “subjective well-being.” It’s also a detriment in most professions. But as Martin Seligman has written, “There is one glaring exception: pessimists do better at law.” In other words, an attitude that makes someone less happy as a human being actually makes her more effective as a lawyer.11 A second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy, we’re both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose.
But the third reason might offer the best explanation of all—and help us understand why so few attorneys exemplify Type I behavior. Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little “decision latitude.” Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it’s another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don’t have much of it. The deprivation starts early. A 2007 study of two American law schools found that over the three-year period in school, students’ overall well-being plummeted—in large part because their need for autonomy was thwarted. But students who had greater autonomy over their course selection, their assignments, and their relations with professors showed far less steep declines and actually posted better grades and bar exam scores.12
“Nothing is more important to my success than controlling my schedule. I’m most creative from five to nine A.M. If I had a boss or co-workers, they would ruin my best hours one way or another.”
SCOTT ADAMS
Dilbert creator
Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour. Most lawyers—and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms—must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time. If they fail to bill enough hours, their jobs are in jeopardy. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible). If the rewards come from time, then time is what firms will get. These sorts of high-stakes, measurable goals can drain intrinsic motivation, sap individual initiative, and even encourage unethical behavior. “If one is expected to bill more than two thousand hours per year,” former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once said, “there are bound to be temptations to exaggerate the hours actually put in.”13
The billable hour is a relic of Motivation 2.0. It makes some sense for routine tasks—whether fitting doors onto the body of a Ford Taurus or adding up deductions on a simple tax form—because there’s a tight connection between how much time goes in and how much work comes out. And if your starting assumption is that workers’ default setting is to shirk, monitoring their time can keep them on their toes.
But the billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonroutine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable. Imagine requiring inventor Dean Kamen or actress Helen Mirren to bill for their time. If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption—that people want to do good work—then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it. Already, a few law firms are moving in this new, more Type I direction—charging a flat rate rather than a time-based fee—with the presiding partner of one of New York’s leading law firms recently declaring, “This is the time to get rid of the billable hour.”14
If the billable hour has an antithesis, it’s the results-only work environment of the kind that Jeff Gunther has introduced at his companies. The first large company to go ROWE was Best Buy—not in its stores, but in its corporate offices. Like 3M’s 15 percent time, Best Buy’s ROWE experiment began as something of a rogue project launched by Ressler and Thompson, whom I mentioned earlier and who have since become ROWE gurus, taking their message of autonomy around the world. Best Buy’s headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota, are airy, modern, and replete with a concierge, cafés, and dry cleaner. But the company had a reputation for punishing hours and intrusive bosses—and it was paying the price in lost talent. Best Buy’s then CEO Brad Anderson quietly agreed to Ressler and Thompson’s weird proposal, because it encouraged “people to contribute rather than just show up and grind out their days.”15
Today, Best Buy’s headquarters has fewer people working a regular schedule than it has those working a ROWE un-schedule. And even though retail electronics is a brutally competitive industry, Best Buy has held its own both in the marketplace and in its quest for talent. Reporting on the company’s ROWE results in the Harvard Business Review, Tamara Erickson writes:Salaried people put in as much time as it takes to do their work. Hourly employees in the program work a set number of hours to comply with federal labor regulations, but they get to choose when. Those employees report better relationships with family and friends, more company loyalty, and more focus and energy. Productivity has increased by 35%, and voluntary turnover is 320 basis points lower than in teams that have not made the change. Employees say they don’t know whether they work fewer hours—they’ve stopped counting.16
Without sovereignty over our time, it’s nearly impossible to have autonomy over our lives. A few Type I organizations have begun to recognize this truth about the human condition and to realign their practices. More, no doubt, will follow. “In the past, work was defined primarily by putting in time, and secondarily on getting results. We need to flip that model,” Ressler told me. “No matter what kind of business you’re in, it’s time to throw away the tardy slips, time clocks, and outdated industrial-age thinking.”
Technique
When you call a customer service line to complain about your cable television bill or to check the whereabouts of that blender you ordered, the phone usually rings in a colorless cavern known as a call center. The person who answers the call, a customer service representative, has a tough job. He typically sits for hours among a warren of cramped cubicles—headset strapped on, a diet soda by his side. The pay is paltry. And the people the rep encounters on the phone—one after another after another—generally aren’t ringing up to offer kudos or to ask about the rep’s weekend plans. They’ve got a gripe, a frustration, or a problem that needs solving. Right. Now.
If that weren’t trying enough, call center reps have little decision latitude and their jobs are often the very definition of routine. When a call comes in, they listen to the caller—and then, in most cases, tap a few buttons on their computer to retrieve a script. Then they follow that script, sometimes
word for word, in the hope of getting the caller off the line as quickly as possible. It can be deadening work, made drearier still because managers in many call centers, in an effort to boost productivity, listen in on reps’ conversations and monitor how long each call lasts. Little wonder, then, that call centers in the United States and the UK have annual turnover rates that average about 35 percent, double the rate for other jobs. In some call centers the annual turnover rate exceeds 100 percent, meaning that, on average, none of the people working there today will be there a year from now.
Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer Zappos.com (now part of Amazon.com), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn’t for them and want to leave, he’ll pay them $2,000—no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz. He’s using an “if-then” reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren’t fit for a Motivation 3.0-style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. Zappos doesn’t monitor its customer service employees’ call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them.
The results of this emphasis on autonomy over technique? Turnover at Zappos is minimal. And although it’s still young, Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States—ahead of better-known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple and roughly equal to ritzy brands like Jaguar and the Ritz-Carlton.17 Not bad for a shoe company based in the Nevada desert.
What Zappos is doing is part of a small but growing move to restore some measure of individual freedom in jobs usually known for the lack of it. For instance, while many enterprises are offshoring work to low-cost providers overseas, some companies are reversing the trend by beginning what’s known as “homeshoring.” Instead of requiring customer service reps to report to a single large call center, they’re routing the calls to the employees’ homes. This cuts commuting time for staff, removes them from physical monitoring, and provides far greater autonomy over how they do their jobs.
The American airline JetBlue was one of the first to try this approach. From its launch in 2000, JetBlue has relied on telephone customer service employees who work at home. And from its launch, JetBlue has earned customer service rankings far ahead of its competitors. Productivity and job satisfaction are generally higher in homeshoring than in conventional arrangements—in part because employees are more comfortable and less monitored at home. But it’s also because this autonomy-centered approach draws from a deeper pool of talent. Many homeshore employees are parents, students, retirees, and people with disabilities—those who want to work, but need to do it their own way. According to one report, between 70 and 80 percent of home-based customer service agents have college degrees—double the percentage among people working in traditional call centers. Ventures like Alpine Access, PHH Arval, and LiveOps, which run customer service departments for a range of companies, report that after adopting this method, their recruiting costs fall to almost zero. Prospective employees come to them. And now these home-based customer service reps are working for a number of U.S. companies—including 1-800-Flowers, J. Crew, Office Depot, even the Internal Revenue Service—handling customer inquiries the way they choose.18 As in any effective Motivation 3.0 workplace, it’s their call.
Team
Whatever your place in the birth order, consider what it’s like to be the third child in a family. You don’t get a say in choosing the people around you. They’re there when you arrive. Worse, one or two of them might not be so glad to see you. And getting rid of even just one of them is usually impossible.
“Autonomy over what we do is most important. The biggest difference between working for other studios and running my own has been the fact that I can choose what job we take on and what product, service, or institution we promote. This I find the single most important question: When I’m close to the content, research becomes easy, meetings become interesting (people who produce interesting products or services are mostly interesting themselves), and I don’t have to be involved in false advertising.”
STEFAN SAGMEISTER
Designer
Taking a new job and holding most jobs are similar. Enterprising souls might be able to scratch out some autonomy over task, time, and technique—but autonomy over team is a taller order. That’s one reason people are drawn to entrepreneurship—the chance to build a team of their own. But even in more traditional settings, although far from typical yet, a few organizations are discovering the virtues of offering people some amount of freedom over those with whom they work.
For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don’t do the hiring. That task falls to a department’s employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time. At W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.19
The ability to put together a pick-up basketball team of company talent is another attraction of 20 percent time. These initiatives usually slice across the organization chart, connecting people who share an interest, if not a department. As Google engineer Bharat Mediratta told The New York Times, “If your 20 percent idea is a new product, it’s usually pretty easy to just find a few like-minded people and start coding away.” And when pushing for a more systemic change in the organization, Mediratta says autonomy over team is even more important. Those efforts require what he calls a “grouplet”—a small, self-organized team that has almost no budget and even less authority, but that tries to change something within the company. For instance, Mediratta formed a testing grouplet to encourage engineers throughout the company to implement a more efficient way to test computer code. This informal band of coders, a team built autonomously without direction from the top, “slowly turned the organization on its axis.”20
Still, the desire for autonomy can often collide with other obligations. One surprise as Atlassian ran the numbers on its task autonomy experiment was that most employees came in substantially under the 20 percent figure. The main reason? They didn’t want to let down their current teammates by abandoning ongoing projects.
Although autonomy over team is the least developed of the four T’s, the ever-escalating power of social networks and the rise of mobile apps now make this brand of autonomy easier to achieve—and in ways that reach beyond a single organization. The open-source projects I mentioned in Chapter 1, in which ad hoc teams self-assemble to build a new browser or create better server software, are a potent example. And once again, the science affirms the value of something traditional businesses have been slow to embrace. Ample research has shown that people working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those working in inherited teams.21 Likewise, studies by Deci and others have shown that people high in intrinsic motivation are better coworkers.22 And that makes the possibilities on this front enormous. If you want to work with more Type I’s, the best strategy is to become one yourself. Autonomy, it turns out, can be contagious.
THE ART OF AUTONOMY
Think for a moment about the great artists of the last hundred years and how they worked—people like Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. Unlike for the rest of us, Motivation 2.0 was never their operating system. Nobody told them: You must paint this sort of picture. You must begin painting precisely at eight-thirty A.M. You must paint with the people we select to work with you. And you must paint this way. The very idea is ludicrous.
But you know what? I
t’s ludicrous for you, too. Whether you’re fixing sinks, ringing up groceries, selling cars, or writing a lesson plan, you and I need autonomy just as deeply as a great painter.
However, encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability. Whatever operating system is in place, people must be accountable for their work. But there are different ways to achieve this end, each built on different assumptions about who we are deep down. Motivation 2.0 assumed that if people had freedom, they would shirk—and that autonomy was a way to bypass accountability. Motivation 3.0 begins with a different assumption. It presumes that people want to be accountable—and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is a pathway to that destination.
Of course, because most workplaces still reverberate with the assumptions of the old operating system, transitioning to autonomy won’t—often can’t—happen in one fell swoop. If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they’ve known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they’ll struggle. Organizations must provide, as Richard Ryan puts it, “scaffolding” to help every employee find his footing to make the transition.
What’s more, different individuals will prize different aspects of autonomy. Some might crave autonomy over a task; others might prefer autonomy over the team. As Zappos CEO Hsieh told me by e-mail, “Studies have shown that perceived control is an important component of one’s happiness. However, what people feel like they want control over really varies, so I don’t think there’s one aspect of autonomy that’s universally the most important. Different individuals have different desires, so the best strategy for an employer would be to figure out what’s important to each individual employee.”